Jaws Part 4

"I'm beginning to wonder. Anyway, f.u.c.k it... for now." Brody took another step, and when Meadows still followed him, he said, "You better go around front, Harry... for appearances' sake."

Brody entered his office through a side door. The boy's mother was sitting in front of the desk, clutching a handkerchief. She was wearing a short robe over her bathing suit.

Her feet were bare. Brody looked at her nervously, once again feeling the rush of guilt. He couldn't tell if she was crying, for her eyes were masked by large, round sungla.s.ses. A man was standing by the back wall. Brody a.s.sumed he was the one who claimed to have witnessed the accident. He was gazing absently at Brody's collection of memorabilia: citations from community-service groups, pictures of Brody with visiting dignitaries. Not exactly the stuff to command much attention from an adult, but staring at it was preferable to risking conversation with the woman.

Brody had never been adept at consoling people, so he simply introduced himself and started asking questions. The woman said she had seen nothing: one moment the boy was there, the next he was gone, "and all I saw were pieces of his raft." Her voice was weak but steady. The man described what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.

"So no one actually saw this shark," Brody said, courting a faint hope in the back of his mind.

"No," said the man. "I guess not. But what else could it have been?"

"Any number of things." Brody was lying to himself as well as to them, testing to see if he could believe his own lies, wondering if any alternative to reality could be made credible. "The raft could have gone flat and the boy could have drowned."

"Alex is a good swimmer," the woman protested.

"Or... was... "

"And what about the splash?" said the man.

"The boy could have been thrashing around."

"He never cried out. Not a word."

Brody realized that the exercise was futile. "Okay," he said. "We'll probably know soon enough, anyway."

"What do you mean?" said the man.

"One way or another, people who die in the water usually wash up somewhere. If it was a shark, there'll be no mistaking it." The woman's shoulders hunched forward, and Brody cursed himself for being a clumsy fool. "I'm sorry," he said. The woman shook her head and wept.

Brody told the woman and the man to wait in his office, and he walked out into the front of the station house. Meadows was standing by the outer door, leaning against the wall. A young man --the reporter from the Times, Brody guessed --was gesturing at Meadows and seemed to be asking questions. The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem st.i.tched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one --"a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it," she said --and when he didn't find himself suddenly wooed by gaggles of summer people, he was humiliated. He tore the alligator off the pocket and used the shirt as a rag to clean the lawn mower with which he earned his summer income. More recently, Ellen had insisted on buying several shifts made by the same manufacturer --paying a premium they could ill afford for the alligator emblem --to help her regain her entree to her old milieu. To Brody's dismay, one evening he found himself nagging Ellen for buying "a ten-dollar dress with a twenty-dollar lizard on it."

Two men were sitting on a bench --the Newsday reporters. One wore a bathing (24) suit, the other a blazer and slacks. Meadows' reporter --Brody knew him as Nat something or other --was leaning against the desk, chat-ting with Bixby. They stopped talking as soon as they saw Brody enter.

"What can I do for you?" Brody said.

The young man next to Meadows took a step forward and said, "I'm Bill Whitman, from the New York Times."

"And?" What am I supposed to do? Brody thought. Fall on my a.s.s?

"I was on the beach."

"What did you see?"

One of the Newsday reporters interrupted: "Nothing. I was there, too. n.o.body saw anything. Except maybe the guy in your office. He says he saw something."

"I know," said Brody, "but he's not sure just what it was he saw." The Times man said, "Are you prepared to list this as a shark attack?"

"I'm not prepared to list this as anything, and I'd suggest you don't go listing it as anything, either, until you know a h.e.l.l of a lot more about it than you do now." The Times man smiled. "Come on, Chief, what do you want us to do? Call it a mysterious disappearance? Boy lost at sea?"

It was difficult for Brody to resist the temptation to trade angry ironies with the Times reporter. He said, "Listen, Mr. --Whitman, is it? --Whitman. We have no witnesses who saw anything but a splash. The man inside thinks he saw a big silvercolored thing that he thinks may have been a shark. He says he has never seen a live shark in his life, so that's not what you'd call expert testimony. We have no body, no real evidence that anything violent happened to the boy... I mean, except that he's missing. It is conceivable that he drowned. It is conceivable that he had a fit or a seizure of some kind and then drowned. And it is conceivable that be was attacked by some kind of fish or animal --or even person, for that matter. All of those things are possible, and until we get..."

The sound of tires grinding over gravel in the public parking lot out front stopped Brody. A car door slammed, and Len Hendricks charged into the station house, wearing nothing but a bathing suit. His body had the mottled gray-whiteness of a Styrofoam coffee cup. He stopped in the middle of the floor. "Chief..." Brody was startled by the unlikely sight of Hendricks in a bathing suit --thighs flecked with pimples, genitals bulging in the tight fabric. "You've been swimming, Leonard?"

"There's been another attack!" said Hendricks. The Times man quickly asked, "When was the first one?" Before Hendricks could answer, Brody said, "We were just discussing it, Leonard. I don't want you or anyone else jumping to conclusions until you know what you're talking about. For G.o.d's sake, the boy could have drowned."

"Boy?" said Hendricks. "What boy? This was a man, an old man. Five minutes ago. He was just beyond the surf, and suddenly he screamed b.l.o.o.d.y murder and his head went under water and it came up again and he screamed something else and then he went down again. There was all this splashing around, and blood was flying all over the place. The fish kept coming back and hitting him again and again and again. That's the biggest f.u.c.kin' fish I ever saw in my whole life, big as a f.u.c.kin' station wagon. I went in up to my waist and tried to get to the guy, but the fish kept hitting him." Hendricks paused, staring at the floor. His breath squeezed out of his chest in short bursts. "Then the fish quit. Maybe he went away, I don't know. I waded out to where the guy was floating. His face was in the water. I took hold of one of his arms and pulled." Brody said, "And?"

"It came off in my hand. The fish must have chewed fight through it, all but a little bit of skin." Hendricks looked up, his eyes red and filling with tears of exhaustion (25) and fright.

"Are you going to be sick?" said Brody.

"I don't think so."

"Did you call the ambulance?"

Hendricks shook his head no.

"Ambulance?" said the Times reporter. "Isn't that rather like shutting the barn door after the horse has left?"

"Shut your mouth, smart a.s.s," said Brody. "Bixby, call the hospital. Leonard, are you up to doing some work?" Hendricks nodded. "Then go put on some clothes and find some notices that close the beaches."

"Do we have any?"

"I don't know. We must. Maybe back in the stock room with those signs that say 'This Property Protected by Police.' If we don't, we'll have to make some that'll do until we can have some made up. I don't care. One way or another, let's get the G.o.ddam beaches closed."

Monday morning, Brody arrived at the office a little after seven. "Did you get it?"

he said to Hendricks.

"It's on your desk."

"Good or bad? Never mind. I'll go see for myself."

"You won't have to look too hard."

The city edition of the New York Times lay in the center of Brody's desk. About three quarters of the way down the right-hand column on page one, he saw the headline:

SHARK KILLS TWO ON LONG ISLAND Brody said, "s.h.i.t," and began to read.

By William F. Whitman Special to The New York Times AMITY L.I. June 20 --A six-year-old boy and a 65-year-old man were killed today in separate shark attacks that occurred within an hour of each other near the beaches of this resort community.

Although the body of the boy, Alexander Kintner, was not found, officials said there was no question that he was killed by a shark. A witness, Thomas Daguerre, of New York, said he saw a large silver-colored object rise out of the water and seize the boy and his rubber raft and disappear into the water with a splash.

Amity coroner Carl Santos reported that traces of blood found on shreds of rubber recovered later left no doubt that the boy had died a violent death.

At least fifteen persons witnessed the attack on Morris Cater, 65, which took place at approximately 2 p.m. a quarter of a mile down the beach from where young Kintner was attacked.

Apparently, Mr. Cater was swimming just beyond the surf line when he was suddenly struck from behind. He called out for help, but all attempts to rescue him were in vain.

"I went in up to my waist and tried to get to him," said Amity police officer Leonard Hendricks, who was on the beach at the time, "but the fish kept hitting him."

Mr. Cater, a jewelry wholesaler with offices at 1224 Avenue of the Americas, was p.r.o.nounced dead on arrival at Southampton Hospital. These incidents are the first doc.u.mented cases of shark attacks on bathers on the Eastern Seaboard in more than two decades.

(26) According to Dr. David Dieter, an ichthyologist at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island, it is logical to a.s.sume --but by no means a certainty --that both attacks were the work of one shark.

"At this time of year in these waters," said Dr. Dieter, "there are very few sharks. It's rare at any time of year for sharks to come so close to the beach. So the chances that two sharks would be off the same beach at virtually the same time --and would each attack someone --are infinitesimal."

When informed that one witness described the shark that attacked Mr. Cater as being "as large as a station wagon," Dr. Dieter said the shark was probably a "great white" (Carcharodon carcharias), a species known throughout the world for its voraciousness and aggressiveness. In 1916, he said, a great white killed four bathers in New Jersey on one day --the only other recorded instance of multiple shark-attack fatalities in the United States in this century. Dr. Dieter attributed the attacks to "bad luck, like a flash of lightning that hits a house. The shark was probably just pa.s.sing by. It happened to be a nice day, and there happened to be people swimming, and he happened to come along. It was pure chance."

Amity is a summer community on the south sh.o.r.e of Long Island, approximately midway between Bridgehampton and East Hampton, with a wintertime population of 1,000. In the summer, the population increases to 10,000.

Brody finished reading the article and set the paper on the desk. Chance, that doctor said, pure chance. What would he say if he knew about the first attack? Still pure chance? Or would it be negligence, gross and unforgivable? There were three people dead now, and two of them could still be alive, if only Brody had...

"You've seen the Times," said Meadows. He was standing in the doorway.

"Yeah, I've seen it. They didn't pick up the Watkins thing."

"I know. Kind of curious, especially after Len's little slip of the tongue."

"But you did use it."

"I did. I had to. Here." Meadows handed Brody a copy of the Amity Leader. The banner headline ran across all six columns of page one: TWO KILLED BY MONSTER SHARK OFF AMITY BEACH. Below that, in smaller type, a subhead: Number of Victims of Killer Fish Rises to Three.

"You sure get your news up high, Harry."

"Read on."

Brody read: Two summer visitors to Amity were brutally slain yesterday by a maneating shark that attacked them as they frolicked in the chill waters off the Scotch Road beach.

Alexander Kintner, age 6, who lived with his mother in the Goose Neck Lane house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Packer, was the first to die --attacked from below as he lay on a rubber raft. His body has not been found.

Less than half an hour later, Morris Cater, 65, who was spending the weekend at the Abelard Arms Inn, was attacked from behind as he swam in the gentle surf off the public beach.

The giant fish struck again and again, savaging Mr. Cater as he cried for help. Patrolman Len Hendricks, who by sheer coincidence was taking his first swim in five years, made a valiant attempt to rescue the struggling victim, but the fish gave no quarter. Mr. Cater was dead by the time he was pulled clear of the water.

The deaths were the second and third to be caused by shark attack off Amity in the past five days.

Last Wednesday night, Miss Christine Watkins, a guest of Mr. and Mr. John Foote of Old Mill Road, went for a swim and vanished. (27) Thursday morning, Police Chief Martin Brody and Officer Hendricks recovered her body. According to coroner Carl Santos, the cause of death was "definitely and incontrovertibly shark attack." Asked why the cause of death was not made public, Mr. Santos declined to comment.

Brody looked up from the paper and said, "Did Santos really decline to comment?"

"No. He said n.o.body but you and I had asked him about the cause of death, so he didn't feel compelled to tell anybody. As you can see, I couldn't print that response. It would have pinned everything on you and me. I had hoped I could get him to say something like, 'Her family requested that the cause of death be kept private, and since there was obviously no crime involved, I agreed,' but he wouldn't. I can't say I blame him."

"So what did you do?"

"I tried to get hold of Larry Vaughan, but he was away for the weekend. I thought he'd be the best official spokesman."

"And when you couldn't reach him?"

"Read."

It was understood, however, that Amity police and government officials had decided to withhold the information in the public interest. "People tend to overreact when they hear about a shark attack," said one member of the Board of Selectmen. "We didn't want to start a panic. And we had an expert's opinion that the odds against another attack were astronomical."

"Who was your talkative selectman?" asked Brody.

"All of them and none of them," said Meadows. "It's basically what they all said, but none of them would be quoted."

"What about the beaches not being closed? Did you go into that?"

"You did."

"I did?"

Asked why he had not ordered the beaches closed until the marauding shark was apprehended, Chief Brody said, "The Atlantic Ocean is huge. Fish swim in it and move from place to place. They don't always stay in one area, especially an area like this where there is no food source. What were we going to do? Close the Amity beaches, and people would just drive up to East Hampton and go swimming there. And there's just as good a chance that they'd get killed in East Hampton as in Amity." After yesterday's attacks, however, Chief Brody did order the beaches closed until further notice.

"Jesus, Harry," said Brody, "you really put it to me. You've got me arguing a case I don't believe, then being proved wrong and forced to do what I wanted to do all along. That's a pretty s.h.i.tty trick."

"It wasn't a trick. I had to have someone give the official line, and with Vaughan away, you were the logical one. You admit that you agreed to go along with the decision, so --reluctantly or not --you supported it. I didn't see any point in airing all the dirty laundry of private disputes."

"I suppose. Anyway, it's done. Is there anything else I should read in this?"

"No. I just quote Matt Hooper, that fellow from Woods Hole. He says it would be (28) remarkable if we ever have another attack. But he's a little less sure than he was last time."

"Does he think one fish is doing all this?"

"He doesn't know, of course, but offhand, yes. He thinks it's a big white."

"I do, too. I mean, I don't know from whites or greens or blues, but I think it's one shark."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure, exactly. Yesterday afternoon I called the Coast Guard out on Montauk. I asked them if they'd noticed a lot of sharks around here recently, and they said they hadn't seen a one. Not one so far this spring. It's still early, so that isn't too strange. They said they'd send a boat down this way later on and give me a call if they saw anything. I finally called them back. They said they had cruised up and down this area for two hours and hadn't seen a thing. So there sure aren't many sharks around. They also said that when there are sharks around, they're mostly medium-sized blue sharks --about five to ten feet --and sand sharks that don't generally bother people. From what Leonard said he saw yesterday, this is no medium-sized blue."

"Hooper said there was one thing we could do," Meadows said. "Now that you've got the beaches closed down, we could chum. You know, spread fish guts and goodies like that around in the water. If there's a shark around, he said, that will bring him running."

"Oh, great. That's what we need, to attract sharks. And what if he shows up? What do we do then?"

"Catch him."

"With what? My trusty spinning rod?"

"No, a harpoon."

"A harpoon. Harry, I don't even have a police boat, let alone a boat with harpoons on it."

"There are fishermen around. They have boats."